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A chance discovery of letters written by her immigrant grandfather leads Jessica J. Lee to her ancestral homeland, Taiwan. There, she seeks his story while growing closer to the land he knew.
Lee hikes mountains home to Formosan flamecrests, birds found nowhere else on earth, and swims in a lake of drowned cedars. She bikes flatlands where spoonbills alight by fish farms, and learns about a tree whose fruit can float in the ocean for years, awaiting landfall. Throughout, Lee unearths surprising parallels between the natural and human stories that have shaped her family and their beloved island. Joyously attentive to the natural world, Lee also turns a critical gaze upon colonialist explorers who mapped the land and named plants, relying on and often effacing the labor and knowledge of local communities.
Two Trees Make a Forest is a genre–shattering book encompassing history, travel, nature, and memoir, an extraordinary narrative showing how geographical forces are interlaced with our family stories.
I disagree with the description that this book is “joyously attentive.” I felt pretty sad by the time I finished reading. I thought the overall narrative was very thin, but that is due in large part because Lee is unable to really solve any mystery from this letter and mystery of her family’s past simply because not much is left behind. Her grandmother fled her home in Nanjing during World War II, after experiencing and surviving some of the horrors that occurred there (her grandmother never really said much, understandably, and while I know the general shape of the atrocities, I don’t think I’m strong enough to bear proper witness to it and read any sort of detailed accounting). Her grandfather had Alzheimer’s and couldn’t ultimately say much about his life before he died.
I don’t think the scarcity in the personal narrative makes this book any less. From my own experiences of delving into my family’s history, I feel like this is a very honest narrative. I didn’t get a sense of this being a “beloved” island because I didn’t really get a sense of who her grandparents were, and I think that is also a reflection of how narratively unsatisfactory it can be to write about a real person’s life, especially a person who’s life is uprooted by war and circumstance many times. Maybe this is my bias as a Western reader and based on the memoirs I’ve read in the past, memoirs that come with a neater arc. One of the last units we did in expository writing this year was writing personal narratives. As examples, we read selections from Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner and Born a Crime by Trevor Noah, and the structure of those narratives had a much more familiar fullness than this book.
All that being said, I’m grateful to have read it. I particularly enjoyed the sections about Taiwan itself, its natural history and colonial history. This memoir served to whet my interest in reading more history. And while I’m not an Outdoor Kid and will not be hiking the mountains that Lee hiked, I would like to go back to Tainan this winter and see if I can see the spoonbills or take some day trips and try to see some of the other birds Lee mentions. And I hope to find more books of nature writing by Taiwanese authors.
Ultimately, the memoir part was the least satisfying (although still deeply affecting as I find myself thinking about her grandparents’ lives and the choices people have to make to survive and will no doubt be thinking about it for a while yet). It reminded me of why I don’t read many memoirs anymore as a matter of personal taste. However, I am glad that I read it.
